IN THE SPOTLIGHT: Pam Heilman, attorney and community volunteer
Few people are more enthusiastic, joyful, grateful, or optimistic than Pam Heilman. She is a board member and number one cheerleader for the Boca Grande Historical Society. Pam served as president of the board for a couple of years, as well.
“I was lucky,” she said, “five years ago they asked me to join and so I got even more involved and engaged. It’s been a wonderful way to give back to our beautiful island, but also to continue this wonderful learning and exploration about Boca Grande history, and then a little wider Florida history.”
Pam is the kind of person who rarely gets involved with something that does not feed her soul and intellect. If it does not start that way, she tends to adjust the project, not her outlook.
One instance of this superpower is her decision to become a lawyer. With limited funds for higher education, and almost no role models to show that women could be successful in the field of law, and no one in her family ever going to college before, she took her parents’ faith and support and won a full scholarship to Vassar College, and then went on to law school.
“I’ve always so admired my parents and their support,” she said. “I had a wonderful education at Vassar, and then went on to law school at the University of Buffalo. Then I was able to obtain my first job and my last legal job, with the Hodgson Russ law firm. It is Buffalo’s oldest continuing business, of any type, and it goes back to 1817. It can also claim two U.S. presidents – the only law firm in the country certified as such by he ABA – Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland, from the 1800s.”
When she joined the firm, she and a fellow female classmate were the only women lawyers there. “So here we were,” she recalled, “seeing if a legal career in a large corporate law firm was going to work. And it did!”
Indeed. Both women became very successful partners. Pam practiced corporate law, including mergers, acquisitions, contracts and such.
“I worked with a lot of close family-owned businesses,” she said, “and even though I’m retired now – it will be 12 full years – I’m still trustee in the family trust for two of those families, and businesses. You do establish some wonderful personal relationships.”
Since Buffalo is so close to the Canadian border, it was decided that three of the partners would open a Toronto office. Pam was selected as one of them in 1989.
“We really had a wonderful time commuting to Toronto and practicing U.S. law in a foreign country. We were the U.S. law experts in corporate law and immigration and taxes. It was a great opportunity, and it is still a very engaged and active office ‘til this day,” she said. That work led to more opportunities.
“Because of the connections I started to make there, I was asked to be on the board of the Canadian-American Business Council, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It works on a lot of national cross-border economic issues.” she said. “And then I also served on the Canada Institute, which is an advisory board at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, in Washington. It is one of the country’s major political think tanks. Somebody like Martin Walker, who the island loves, has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and there are various national institutes there. Again, I was on the Canadian Board with several prior ambassadors from both countries. I was very lucky; there were very exciting things.”
In addition to her paying job, Pam also became involved in the community. Beginning in the 1990s she became involved in the local United Way. “I was the first woman to chair the the United Way Campaign in Buffalo, that was in 1992,” she said, adding the kicker, “and raising over $17 million!” She noted that the group has not hit that amount since then.
“Then I became the first woman board chair. So, I became very involved, and in some ways very well known in the not-for-profit community of Buffalo. And then, with one of my other partners, who was similarly engaged in the community, we founded a not-for-profit practice group in the firm.”
This practice group organized and enhanced the legal services of not-for-profit organizations.
“We did not do it for free, which surprised many of them, but we were really expert at what we were doing, and we did have ways to discount. But I used to tell them they weren’t ‘discounted clients.’”
She helped establish that this could be a real practice area. Other major projects included revitalization of South Street Seaport in New York. “I was able to help them navigate and become a part if the City Museum of New York,” she said. “We also did a major project with the Hindu Society of North America, located in Queens. It is the largest Hindu group in the country, with 30,000 devotees.”
“I was at the law firm for 37 years,” she noted. “My major business client, which I am still somewhat involved with, owned – and still does – television stations all over the country. It is a smaller broadcast management company. So that was fun, too. So, it was a real variety of interests that really kept me busy.”
Then, at the end of the 1980s, one of her law partners discovered Boca Grande. Members of the firm started visiting, and Pam and her husband Bob were among them. That partner owned a condo at Sea Oats, and Pam and Bob started renting it more and more frequently.
“More and more we just loved this island,” she said. “So, as we started to think about retirement, Bob and I actually bought this unit at the Boca Grande Club.” That was in 2002. They had it fully renovated in 2008.
“Then we both decided, and we were both lucky enough to be able to, we fully retired at the end of 2011. That was 12 years ago, and we have never looked back. Nobody thought we could retire.”
But they did, cold turkey!
“When you do that it’s like standing on the edge of a precipice, and you’re leaping into the total unknown. But we knew we loved the island.” Beginning in about 2006 they started coming for long weekends every month and getting to know their neighbors, the organizations, and began learning more and more of the history of the area and even expanding to other parts of Florida.
“I’ve always loved history, the natural world, and so, here we were, in this endlessly fascinating place,” she said. “So I started to go to some lectures that the Historical Society was doing at the auditorium, and of course, in February making sure I got to History Bites every Wednesday morning to begin to learn about the history of Boca Grande. And then, from some of those talks, they’d mention a book and I’d go check it out.”
She is proud to say she helped the Historical Society develop the reading list that now appears on its website, both fiction and nonfiction books that tell the stories of Boca Grande, Southwest Florida and the history of its development. When all is said and done, though, none of what she has done in the past, and nothing of the beauty she has in her life now would mean a thing if she were not sharing it with her husband, Bob.
“Without Bob there’s no me,” she said. They met at the end of high school, when Bob started attending classes at her school in the last semester of senior year. By prom they were dating, and the rest is history. They have been married for more than 53 years, she calculated, “And we still like each other,” they said in unison.
They have no children, but they have been surrounded by children all their lives, thanks to relatives who are happy to share their young ones with Pam and Bob.
Bob is an engineer, and before deciding to retire, he had been running a manufacturing plant.
“The main project of the plant these days is Original Buffalo Snow, the white, fluffy fiber that you put around your Christmas tree and village scene,” said Pam. “It’s still sold at Walmart and Michaels and Canadian Tire. They say ‘Original Buffalo Snow’ on the package, ‘brought to you by the workers in Buffalo, N.Y., the snow enjoyment capital of the world.’
Bob had been sourcing complementary product lines at the end of his career, including flakes, tree skirts and artificial snow blankets. These were made mostly in China, so he was going there about three times a year, and really enjoying the travel. They have continued to travel. Pam and her sister Carol went on the Friends of Boca Grande trip to Africa.
Traveling is nice, but she still really likes coming back to Boca Grande.
She continues: “There is peacefulness here, and the intellectual engagement with everybody.”
“You don’t always have that elsewhere today. We’ve been here now full-time since the beginning of 2012, so we will have completed 12 full years, and as we have stayed we have just come to value more and more what’s here on the island. It continues to be an extraordinarily special place, where we are extremely happy to be. This is home.”
